How to Talk about Race and Racism

Let’s Talk About Race in Our World Literature Classroom¹¹⁸⁶⁴

There is much that students and teachers can do to create an intersectional, anti-racist classroom. We should be able to talk about race and white supremacy as a community to foster understanding and solidarity among each other. As Carla María Thomas writes in her essay “The Medieval Literature Survey Reimagined”:

Without identifying the forms of power within such a matrix [of domination], we cannot fully recuperate the damage done within the college classroom to intersectional, particularly racialized, bodies, both those who teach and who are taught, those who inhabit the ivory tower and who seek to enter it — the medievalist scholar-teacher and the medievalist novice-student.

It takes considerable effort for students and teachers to create an antiracist classroom because it takes exposing our fragile relationships to each other—dealing with the ways that power has shaped our lived experiences beyond what we can control—and becoming a community of learners through that shared understanding. Throughout the semester, but especially in the first week of classes, it is important to constantly acknowledge that conversations about race and white supremacy might make us feel vulnerable and uncomfortable.

Students that identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) might feel scared that they will be hurt by micro/macro aggressions and are tired of being the target of racist behavior. First of all, we must strive to make a classroom in which we do not harm each other; we need to be there for each other and actively stop racist behavior if we can (90 percent of the time, you see the racism coming in the classroom and you can actively do something to stop it).

Many students, white students especially, might feel deep discomfort, guilt, and hostility with discussions on race. They have been taught that to be racist is to be bad, and these discussions often show them that they have racist tendencies and privileges they take for granted. We must understand that having feelings is normal. It’s okay to feel uncomfortable; it’s okay to feel vulnerable. What if we sit with our feelings and think why we feel the way we do. These discussions are difficult for all of us, and the best we can do is be honest about our own limitations.

What does it mean to begin this course thinking about race? If done right, it means being prepared to discuss power, race, anti-racism, and white supremacy. The thing is that race is a construct, we made it up, but racialization—the ways that we use race to make decisions that affect the people around us—is very real. The consequences of racialization hurt the people impacted by these signifiers. Although the class will delve into the past, we must begin by understanding our present. More importantly, we must begin by understanding the consequences of racism to every single one of us.

So please read:

–Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack,” –Ernestine Hayes’s “Packing the Invisible Knapsack.”

— Ijeoma Oluo’s “The Anger of the White Male Lie,”

— Soraya Chemaly’s “What Does it Mean that Most Children’s Books Are Still About White Boys?,”

These texts help us begin to examine racism and white supremacy, but more importantly they help us understand the consequences of racism and white supremacy. While the essays from Peggy McIntosh and Ernestine Hayes discuss the advantages of whiteness and the disadvantages that come of experiencing racism, Soraya Chamaly’s and Ijeoma Oluo’s essays show how white supremacy affects everyone, including white people. Together, these essays help us start discussions on race, anti-racism, and solidarity in the classroom.

Chemaly’s and Oluo’s essays, for example, help us dismantle the idea that white people should do anti-racist work for selfless reasons. Instead, they explain that being an anti-racist is about building just and equitable communities for everyone. Soraya Chemaly discusses what it means that most children’s books are about boys, mostly white boys. She explains that by making white boys the magically inclusive standard, we fail all children. While BIPOC and white women lose chances to fair and multi-faceted representation:

Boys who grow up seeing themselves everywhere as powerful and central just by virtue of being boys, often white, are critically impaired in many ways. It’s a rude shock to many when things don’t turn out the way they were told they should. … The real boy crisis we should be talking about is entitlement and outdated notions of masculinity, both of which are persistently responsible for leaving boys confused and unprepared for contemporary adulthood.

Chemaly’s essay discusses the holistic harm that white supremacy and toxic masculinity impart on our youth. From our childhoods, white supremacy constructs a world in which most of us do not get to see ourselves as fully participatory in the world, and those of us who do, mainly white boys, do not get to learn empathy, how to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and we don’t learn that things don’t always turn out the way we want them to.

Chemaly’s essay is a powerful context for discussing Ijeoma Oluo’s “The Anger of the White Male Lie” which gets at the pain and anger that many people experience because of injustice. She discusses how that pain and anger manifests not just for her and for marginalized and racialized communities, but also for white men. She shows that BIPOC anger is rooted in having to work harder to have less and to settle for less because at least you got something. In contrast, white men’s anger is rooted in being promised access to everything when access to everything is not possible. Oluo writes that “white men are the only people allowed to fully believe in the American dream and perhaps that is the cruelest thing to have ever been done to them and the world that has to suffer their anger as they refuse to let go of a fantasy that we were never allowed to imagine ourselves in.” White men have been raised to believe that they are the standard in a world where nothing is standard.

Through this discussion of these pieces, I want to make it clear that we do not live in a just or equitable society. I want us to understand unequivocally that being anti-racist is the best thing for every single one of us, even if our current white supremacist society makes it hard and fools us into thinking that this it is not the case. The essays juxtapose the loss that BIPOC face in our current society with the benefits of white privilege while they show that white supremacy, systemic racism, and bias hurts everyone; people with unchecked privilege struggle to learn empathy and often have terrible coping mechanisms.

So, how do we move away from white supremacy, whiteness, and white privilege when these mechanisms continue to affect us so deeply? Because our society treats whiteness as the norm, we must understand that to be white is to also have a race that is presented as the absence of racialization. What all this means in our classroom is that every single one of us had a different path to get here and together we hold more knowledge than ever before. We are all in this together, we have much to learn from one another, and we can thrive together as a community.

FURTHER READINGS:

For a detailed definition of race and racism, see the “AAPA Statement on Race & Racism” by the American Association of Physical Anthropologist:

https://bioanth.org/about/aaba-statement-on-race-racism/

For resources on talking about race, see the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian online platform “Talking About Race”:

https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race

https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/race-and-racial-identity

For resources on talking about race in early literature see the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies” Throughlines:

https://www.throughlines.org/navigation

For a discussion on oppression and inequality, see “SWS Factsheet: Oppression Without Bigots” by Abby L. Ferber and Dena R. Samuels:

https://socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/fact_3-2010-oppression.pdf

For information on the effects of the US carceral state, see the documentary 13^th directed by Ava DuVernay:

https://www.netflix.com/title/80091741)